Monday, January 17, 2011

My Holy Setup and Macros

Alright, I've been bouncing around Holy playstyle for a bit now, and I think I've come up with a setup that's making me happy. This is what I'm currently doing in game. I'm not 100% sure it's what is recommended by Elitist Jerks, et al. Last time I looked at EJ, they seem to have gotten distracted by trying to find the maximum possible rate of Holy Power generation. Which, to me, is sort of missing the forest for the trees.

I take the Word of Glory points, skip Tower of Radiance, and put 1 point in Blessed Life.

Spells

On the Word of Glory side, WoG is really good for tank healing. Even if it does less healing than Light of Dawn, it's much easier to keep a tank up with it. I put Beacon on one tank, and mainly focus the other tank.

Healing-wise, my seal is Seal of Insight naturally. My main rotation is 3pt WoG (or LoD if need more raid healing), then Holy Shock, then a HS-DL macro:

/castsequence Holy Light, Holy Light, Divine Light

What I've found is that if I only use HL as a filler, I spend almost no mana, but it seems to need a little more punch. If I try and use DL as a filler, I go dry very fast. The 2:1 ratio of HL:DL seems to drain mana at a nice rate, while doing a solid amount of healing.

Of course, if you need to bust out DL or FoL for intense healing you still can. I've macro'd Guardian of Ancient Kings with DL, so that the emergency heals start together.

/cast Guardian of Ancient Kings/cast Divine Light

I've also macro'd my trinkets and Divine Protection to Holy Shock, to get maximum use out of them.

The last macro I use is Holy Radiance and Divine Favor or Avenging Wrath.

/castrandom Divine Favor, Avenging Wrath/cast Holy Radiance

What this does is trigger one of Divine Favor or Avenging Wrath. It casts whichever one is not on cooldown, or randomly picks one if both are available. I find it's good for spreading out your CDs, while still ensuring that your Holy Radiances are boosted.

Edit:As people have indicated in the comments, this does not work as I intended. The /castrandom can choose the spell on CD, and if that happens then it won't choose a different spell until it casts the original spell.

So that's healing spells. Also don't forget Blessing of Sacrifice and Judge often. I definitely need to improve the amount I judge.

Stats and Gear

Main stat is Intellect. Intellect flask and food.

Secondary stat order: Spirit > Haste > Crit > Mastery.

Reforge Mastery then Crit to Spirit then Haste. Enchants focuses on stats as presented, but get Run Speed to boots.

For gems, I think the stat bonuses are worth it this time around, so red Int gems, orange Int/Haste gems, and blue Int/Spi gems.

I was subscribed up until I saw you refer to your healing "rotation" and that you use a /castsequence macro. I don't think I want to subscribe to someone who thinks a healing rotation macro is a good idea.

One question I haven't seen clearly addressed is "how much haste should I have?" A couple numbers:

The hard Haste cap at 85 is 3489 (with JotP and a standard 5% haste buff). This gives the 1.0 second GCD and a 1.66 (repeating of course) second DL/HL cast. I don't think it's possible to reach that number with T11 gear (leaving open the possibility that maybe you can if you reforge/gem absurdly and count on trinket procs).

Aside from that, there are several haste plateaus. The first is 774. With the buffs, this much haste will grant a 13th tick on Holy Raidiance (15 using Divine Favor, 16 using Heroism, and 20 using both DF and Heroism). The next such plateau is 1860, which grants a 14th tick. I don't think you can get to 1860 with heroic/rep/crafted gear, but again I could be wrong.

774 is a magic number again since it also brings your HL and DL casts to under 2 seconds, which also happens to be the standard boss swing timer. So practically I would say that 774 is requisite for raiding. Practically, you want more (I've seen 1400 suggested). So if you don't have that much haste a) your gear probably sucks and b) reforge/enchant to get there. Otherwise, following the "reforge spirit when possible, otherwise haste" is the reforging strategy I've seen.

was subscribed up until I saw you refer to your healing "rotation" and that you use a /castsequence macro. I don't think I want to subscribe to someone who thinks a healing rotation macro is a good idea.

Give it a whirl before dismissing it. It didn't run me out of mana, the tanks felt more stable, and my healing increased. HL and DL have the same cast time, and as such, they are often interchangeable.

I'm just automatically mixing in some DLs in the base healing. If I need to specifically use DL or FoL, I still can cast them separately.

This "rotation" is not the only spells I cast. It's just the default if nothing special is happening or more healing is not required. My "auto-attack" of healing, if you will.

For raiding, you'll want 1800-2000 spirit (on top of that I use the JC owl, Tear of Blood, and have the BElf cooldown for extra mana) and at least 1200 haste to start. At least IMO that's a good starting point for the first half of raid bosses. I've got those stats with only heroic, rep, crafted, vendor relic, and T11 pants dropped in BH.

Contrast that to the best geared holy paladin on my server. He's got 1643 haste, 2100 spirit with only 3 346 pieces. His guild has completed 12/12 regular and 1/12 hard.

"The /castrandom can choose the spell on CD, and if that happens then it won't choose a different spell until it casts the original spell."

Just out of interest, is there any other way you can achieve your intended effect with a macro? In effect, you want the macro to prioritise, right? So try and cast spell A, but if spell A is on cooldown, try and cast spell B instead. What about a cast sequence with a reset time of the shorter cooldown? So you cast spell A, then if press the macro again before the cooldown of spell A is up, it casts spell B -- otherwise it resets and you cast spell A again. Maybe?

I don't see holy shock in your article. Do you use it much? I tried /castsequence holy light, holy shock, divine light but found that my mana was drying up fast and my HPS was low and my pug group was getting pissed off at me. So I moved to 2 holy lights and 1 holy shock. that was better for mana but my HPS was still lower than just spamming holy light.

I must say that I find your setup very strange and from what I can make out it seems extremely inefficient to me. Although I guess I have to bear in mind that I only play 10man and different playstyles can really make a difference nowadays.

Well, first off. I can't see why you leave out Tower of Radiance. To me it is an extremely good way to conserve mana.

Then macroing Divine protection with shock and trinkets seems stupid to me. You would want to use Sacrifice with Protection to ease up tank healing in intense phases which most likely would be out of sync with these macros.

Also I find use trinkets extremely good for compensating the healing decrease Plea gives. Together with Avenging Wrath or Divine Favor, which again would be destroyed by these macros.

Using a Spirit pop trinket like e.g. Core of Ripeness at the first shock of a fight would just be retarded. the whole effect would be wasted. Same goes for Protection. Can't recall almost any bossfight that does raid dmg from the first second of the fight really.

Also when it comes to Glyphs I would personally say that every paladin should carry a few powders in their bags to be able to adapt their glyphs to the fights a bit better. Some glyphs are really useless on some fights as of now. For example Cleansing doesn't do anything in a fight where there's no dispelling going on obviously, why not change it for let's say 10% mana from LoH?

You'll have to excuse me for being so frank, but your current playstyle just seems very lazy and inefficient to me. I couldn't help making a post, highliting what I would call weaknesses.

I could honestly say, even without trying, that using this playstyle in our 10man for the time being would make us fail brutally.

And again, this is not meant as an offensive or personally attacking post, more as constructive criticism.